Is Almost Famous the defining movie of the 2000s? One columnist believes so.

At the beginning, he explained what he thought the top movie of this decade is. It had to meet three criteria:

• Excellence

• Originality

• Rewatchability

He then used quotes from that movie to explain this summer in the NBA (the column falls flat here, I think).

Anyways, his choice was Almost Famous. While he gives good enough reasons, I can’t help but believe there are other movies that would better define this decade (as the best movie of the decade should).

I decided there must be other films better than that. So I decided to try to come up with five others.

Remember, these aren’t necessarily my favourite movies, but just the ones I thought would define this decade the best.

So with that, here are my top 5 movies of the 2000s.

Is Superbad the most defining movie of the 2000s? This blogger says yes, sadly.

5) The Lord of the Rings trilogy: I decided to lump these three together because it would be too hard to pick and choose one or two over the other. While it gets point for excellence and rewatchability, it loses points for originality, since it was based on the books.

4) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Re-defined the martial arts genre for a while. Gets points for creativity and excellence, but loses points on rewatchability. I think a straight-forward martial arts film would stand the test of time more than watching the special effects fights in this film.

3) Kill Bill: Again, I included both films in this one. It upped the violence found in a lot of movies, and gave an interesting premise. Instead of the man bent of revenge, it was a kick-ass woman. Each fight scene was great, but I don’t think there’s ever a point where you’ll sit down, see this film on TV, and want to watch it for one specific scene, so it loses a little on the rewatchabililty criterion.

2) Wall-E: Cute movie, that both kids and adults love. Not a lot of dialogue, but keeps you interested. It’s creative, original, and can be rewatched. But should a cartoon be the defining movie of a decade? That’s debateable, but this movie comes close.

1) Superbad: You could almost put any other comedy movie of the past five years in this spot (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, etc.). Superbad was definitely excellent, and was original. The rewatchability of it is still up in the air, but I think there would be times if I flipping through the channels, and this movie was on, I would stop to watch it.

Conclusion: Could these movies beat out Almost Famous as top movie of the decade? I think Wall-E and Superbad could, but the other three couldn’t.

I just found it sad that there is no one movie that jumps out from this decade. The 1990s had Saving Private Ryan, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Forrest Gump and Titanic, and probably a dozen others.